ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF ‘WILD THINGS’

Artist’s groundbreaking approach helped transform the world of children’s literature

Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83.

The cause was complications from a recent stroke.

Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963.

Among the other titles he wrote and illustrated, all from Harper & Row, are “In the Night Kitchen” (1970) and “Outside Over There” (1981), which together with “Where the Wild Things Are” form a trilogy; “The Sign on Rosie’s Door” (1960); “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” (1967); and “The Nutshell Library” (1962), a boxed set of four tiny volumes comprising “Alligators All Around,” “Chicken Soup With Rice,” “One Was Johnny” and “Pierre.”

Sendak’s work was the subject of critical studies and major exhibitions; in the second half of his career, he was also renowned as a designer of theatrical sets.

In book after book, Sendak upended the staid, centuries-old tradition of American children’s literature. Sendak’s characters, by contrast, are headstrong, bossy, even obnoxious. His pictures are often unsettling. His plots are fraught with rupture.

Despite its wild popularity, Sendak’s work was not always well-received. Some early reviews of “Where the Wild Things Are” expressed puzzlement and unease. Writing in Ladies’ Home Journal, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim took Sendak to task for punishing Max:

“The basic anxiety of the child is desertion,” Bettelheim wrote. “To be sent to bed alone is one desertion, and without food is the second desertion.” (Bettelheim admitted that he had not actually read the book.)

Sendak’s awards include the Caldecott Medal, Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award and, in 1996, the National Medal of the Arts, presented by President Bill Clinton. Twenty-two of his titles have been named New York Times best illustrated books of the year.

Maurice Bernard Sendak was born in Brooklyn on June 10, 1928; his father, Philip, was a dressmaker in the garment district of Manhattan. Family photographs show the infant Maurice, or Murray as he was then known, as a plump, round-faced, slanting-eyed, droopy-lidded, arching-browed creature — looking, in other words, exactly like a baby in a Maurice Sendak illustration. Sendak adored drawing babies, in all their fleshy petulance.

As Sendak grew up — lower class, Jewish, gay — he felt permanently shunted to the margins of things.

“All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy,” he told The New York Times in a 2008 interview. “They never, never, never knew.”

Sendak’s companion of a half-century, Eugene Glynn, a psychiatrist who specialized in the treatment of young people, died in 2007. No immediate family members survive.